I Testify: Truth and Self in Law and Fiction (ASECS San Antonio, March 22-25 2012)

This panel will explore the intersections between legal testimony and fictional narrative. In courtrooms and novels, individuals tell their own stories in order to convince audiences of particular truths. In both, outcomes depend on establishing character, generating sympathy, and suggesting motive and justification. We solicit papers that investigate the relationship between story, truth, and person in eighteenth-century fiction and law. Topics might include stagings of legal process in novels; usage of legal concepts in fictional concepts of self; novelistic elements within jurisprudence; or comparisons between legal and fictional definitions of truth or self. Papers that compare legal processes over time or among nations are particularly welcome.